Limbo
by HazeLavender
Summary: Riddick is in Slam. What’s it like to survive in the in between?


Title: Limbo  
  
Author: HazeLavender  
  
Rating: R for language, mild violence, sexuality, and graphic descriptions  
  
Disclaimer: Don't own anything PB related.  
  
Feedback: Any and all...including flames.  
  
Chapter One: In Between  
  
Through bottomless lewd-eyed tunnels, the animals shift and play-live. The abundant stench of the dead ends and the dead tired and the plain dead enclose the underground like smoke penetrating through a stained lung. It gives off its own pheromones, while at the same time taking the surgical care to cut and steal chemicals from the inhabitants. Feeding off them, the daily douses of blurry water, leaking from the rusted sprinklers, isn't enough to mutate the air or the dirty skin of convicts. Far worse, though, is the scent of disregard and doubt that rubs on the fading numbers of prisoner garb and flickers on shaky lines, that are permanently but not infinitely crossed into the hard cement of wall.   
  
A number. A name. Quite the opposite, yet they mold and create their own flatulent flesh, here in the underground. Different parts of this institution hold varying existence. Those of the wailing weaklings, who have not yet grasped the ideology that to make the torturer stop one must shut the fuck up, and even those of the slapped silent diversification, where the pitches of quiet are eerie enough to give birth to a covering blanket of gloom.   
  
A person shouldn't feel. If they wish to survive. Though survival during this endless time is questionable. A panel of murderers, rapists, thieves and worse - acceptors of nature - chew their own tainted souls out and leave just a compact spot for all the unmentionables. Therefore, to feel would negate the self-carved and painful realization of depravity.  
  
Freedom. It's there, beyond the mental locks, fears of sinners, and man made jail. It's there. It's called ignorance. But even shunning the implausible is sweeter sounding than spending the rest of your pretend-days in a cowering sort of darkness. Bullied like some kind of punished tyke or forced to become some over-baked pastry. Petulant and bitter. Not to mention impotent, except in static doses of power that burst unexpectedly and end in violence.  
  
The routine of it all is incentive enough to carve into your own skin and bone, to grind out all your anxieties into unrefined sweat and blood. A cake mixture of hard work and loss. But even than, an inmate probably wouldn't give into those internal voices just for the mere and sobering fact that another caged loon would probably lap at the dripping blood and rape the corpse. No one wants to go out like that. Even if "out" had already claimed the body, the - here it is again - doubt of just physical finality is high among the worst offenders, and they choose to not take a coward's way out, just in the intangible hope of having more once they do kick the bucket.   
  
Riddick just wants to get out. He doesn't - yet - think of this as his residence. It's merely a sharp bump, at worse an infection that needs to be flushed out, but never an actual unbreakable restraint. Restraints, that he is familiar with, include a sadistic entity of names, looking sick put together: cuffs, bits, chains, blindfolds...all meaningless bits of material he has broken before they broke him. So why not this?   
  
Easy. He could get out of this overrated, overstated shithole.... Easy.   
  
But that's what he thought a year ago.   
  
Rough hands clutter the disarray of weapons unto the flattened stone, in a dark corner. He can't take them all, so he must choose carefully and keep mobile function at the tip. Though the one with the symbolic death runes looks vicious, Riddick knows the slightly less intimidating shiv would fly quicker through the air. If there's one thing Richard B. Riddick understands, but even more than that - relates to - it's effectiveness. Even in the worst of situations, he takes measured spoonfuls of malicious glee in working something out by himself.   
  
His fingertips brush the lack luster assortment of weapons and gingerly apply pressure to the worn surfaces of gleaming substances. To have more time would have shone through the dust of Slam to reveal a concentrated murderer selecting his companion for the week. Before it would be sticking out of some hyped up bastard, that thought Riddick was someone to fuck (with). But as it is....  
  
Riddick virtuously selects his revered and tucks it in his boot. Closing his eyes, blocking out the sometimes non-useful shine, he runs his hand, with a lovers care, over the remaining beauties. With an almost supernatural pull, his hand comes to a seductive stop atop a more ragged shiv than he usually picks. But he doesn't question it; instead he slips it into the waistband of his pants and walks back the way he came, passing the now coagulating blood on some unnamed body.  
  
Each month the pit where the mush of liquidly stuff is served changes. For no other reason than the guards trying their heavy hand at mind fucking with jailors. Some die trying to find the source of protein, while those honed and balanced with their instincts, those like Riddick, always seem to find the new locale. Each time - if possible - it's an even more hideous hole and cruel test of space. To be coughed, sneezed, hacked, died on is so unhygienic that it almost gives the impression of invincibility once you're outside again. Riddick knows that once he is breathing the shit that real life is made of, he'll be able to inhale and say with certainty he'd been through worse than that. Any one of these days he'll be able to say that....  
  
Grabbing an ancient gray bowl from the slot, popping them out periodically, Riddick doesn't bother sitting. He tilts the slosh into his mouth and takes care to not chew, swallowing whole the chunks of whatever down. Promptly, he sets to lick the rim of the bowl. The more prison domesticated and single-minded oriented would stuff their face deep and lap at the meager remains, gathering at the bottom of the bowl, but not Riddick. Riddick wouldn't ever become that trained. Instead he collects wheezy thoughts, intoxicated by lack of feeling, on what kind of shiv he can make out of this bowl. Another addition to the crumbling empire of crap he keeps in case he can get something in return. After all, at one point in time he got fucking vision for ten Menthol Kools. Anything's possible in this hell.  
  
As he stands perpetually around this vastness of nothingness, his nostrils fill with a decapitation of scent. Something not belonging and itching at his wired nerves. Another block in the numerous electricity failed blocks of Slam: female, small, weak....A function block.   
  
He isn't kidding anyone; it's true: he has thought about cornering the woman, really just a girl, behind the scent and raping her but whenever he had collected a bout of energy, it dissipated into inconsistent intervals where he either had to kill someone or vaguely touch himself through the material of his pants, on the cusp of holding back a growl. He got tired more often than he would even admit to himself. But forced boundaries could do that to a man, which he doesn't think of himself as anymore. Not really sure if he ever had.   
  
But there is only a goddesses hand full of women in Slam and they are all chained to something: a man, a wall, a disfigurement, rendering them unfuckable. Yes, it happens...extreme abuse leads them down a dark route of swollen infection and oozing impermeability. Those young hags are usually slaughtered or put to a mishmash of unreasonable toil that coerces them down the same road.   
  
Riddick is indifferently aware women are bare objects, teeming on the pale line of indulgence or burden. He has never tried to catch one for himself, knowing full well that a good fuck once in a while would be immeasurable, but also knowing that when the time came he had to fight a rapid cog of the System, unhindered and dirty, erect and salivating, trying to take her, he would most likely kill both of them. Those kind of pretentious battles are troublesome and usually clog your perceptions.   
  
However, a friendly sample of the girl being led on the coiled brown rope by a thunderstorm of a bastard would have been nice. Beyond nice, if it could only become doable. She smells of ownership, though. A heady predicament on its own; to take or not to take? Forbidding and flimsy. Flimsy like her scuffed pants and soil stained shirt, clinging to her form. Not romantic or erotic in any way, but Riddick can't help the seemingly un-desperate stare at her wrecked body. Ten minutes...he would only need ten minutes. To push into her and rid himself of the pestering tender groin he is now experiencing. He wonders if her owner perhaps ever gives her moments alone, maybe collecting some water or sleeping on the floor, unchained?   
  
He can't waste thoughts on this, though. Not when sexuality is like a rude alarm going off, announcing those with "property" to take heed. Riddick surreptitiously walks past her, breathing her in, while giving her a dexterous opportunity to take him in, as much as she can with only a few seconds of her raised head, before it scattered its web like shadow back to the ground, timid of those with silver eyes...those like her master.  
  
Maybe that flare of fear he saw in her un-shined eyes is enough to get him off, but Riddick is escalating helplessly into obsession, without even fully trying to hinder the evolution. He comprehends the consequences and is exposed to the bits of savagery that would conclude any contact they had and yet despite that, or maybe because of it he feels the twitchy response to her particular odor and almost looks forward to catching her unaccompanied in a shady tunnel. Someday. Maybe tomorrow. If he can tell when tomorrow comes, that is. 


End file.
